Searching for “Anduril Relic” on eBay returns a lot of prop swords from The Lord of the Rings. It also returns a hunk of metal pulled from the wreckage of a crashed drone made by the defense contractor Anduril. At $1,500, the bit of drone is selling for far more than any of the nerdy replicas.
The “Anduril Relic” was originally part of a collection of merchandise being hawked online by the defense contractor Anduril Industries. Founded by Oculus designer Palmer Luckey in 2017, Anduril is an “AI-powered” attempt by Luckey to apply the disruptive lessons of Silicon Valley to the defense industry. A big part of that project is making the defense industry cool again.
At the end of last month, Anduril opened a gear store that sells clothing and “relics.” The relics are a “recovered crash component from an Anduril Research & Development test.” For just $120, anyone can own a piece of a broken loitering munition or a busted drone.
I admire the marketing here. It makes my gamer brain itch. Every “relic” is bagged and tagged. They’re in vacuum-sealed clear plastic with a sticker in the bottom left-hand corner that indicates weight and rarity. As the rarity changes so does the color of the sticker. An aluminum plate is common, white. A bit of an exhaust is rare, black. A fuel cap? Well, that’s legendary, neon yellow.
Like so much else in Luckey’s life, the tiered and colored rarity system is pulled from video games. In another nod to the hobby that shaped him, Luckey borrowed a less popular feature of gaming: the loot box. Two of the listings on the gear store are for “mystery relics.” Their features blurred out, an Anduril fan has to pony up $120 and take what they get when the package comes. In a bit of small decency, the store lists the rarity of each of the blind items so you’ll at least be able to temper your expectations.
A defense company running a branded store isn’t new. Lockheed Martin has a storefront where employees and “fans” can scoop up branded clothing made by Brooks Brothers and The North Face. What’s different about Anduril is the target audience. There’s a millennial shitposting energy to it. Brooks Brothers would never be caught dead anywhere near this stuff. It’s too garish, too weird, too online.
Luckey teased the store’s opening on November 27 by posting an old magazine ad for Smith & Wesson firearms on X. Later that day the store opened. “The Anduril Gear Store is finally live” Luckey said in a post on X. “It has taken a lot of legal wrangling to get this over the finish line, literally years of work—selling Anduril-branded consumer goods is a problem very distinct from selling Anduril-branded weapons.”
The initial offering of Anduril-branded merchandise was pretty tame, even by defense standards. The most striking pieces are Anduril flight jackets. They’ve got an Anduril patch on the right arm and neon yellow highlights that’ll stand out in a crowd. They’re sold out.
There’s also a Reyn Spooner-designed Anduril Hawaiian shirt. The design shows off Anduril-designed drones and weapon systems intermixed with the native fauna of Hawaii. Luckey himself poses as the model for these shirts. There’s Luckey hanging off the side of a boat, the American flag waving in the background. Luckey is lounging in the sun, a lemonade in his hand, the weapons of war he manufactures all over his shirt. These are not sold out.
The new gear store is for normie Anduril fans. Real heads know that licensed Anduril merch landed earlier this year on the KommandoStore—an online shop where people can buy military-style clothing. KommandoStore licensed the Anduril weapons Ghost and Altius, turned them into anime waifus, and produced a short visual novel about the characters that it put up on YouTube.
The short, titled Help! My Anime Dreamgirl is an ALTIUS 600M Loitering Munition, tells the story of a boy who bought an ALTIUS 600M loitering munition on eBay from someone in Ukraine. Through the magic of anime, it transforms into a beautiful anime waifu. KommandoStore sells t-shirts, hoodies, patches, and a sticker featuring the characters.
“It’s the perfect way to make new defense-contractor friends, confuse the staff at your local airbase, or seriously concern your friends and family,” the listing on the site says. “Special thanks to Palmer Luckey and the Anduril staff for: a) saving the Western world from itself and b) being cool with a bunch of nerds waifu-fying their drones. Anduril™ ALTIUS™ GHOST™ the Anduril stylized triangle with three curved sides logo, are trademarks of Anduril Industries Inc., used under license.”
Luckey aims to be more than just a defense contractor. He’s an avowed propagandist who wants to change the way America, and the West more broadly, thinks about defense. His project is not just to disrupt the defense industry, but to make the defense industry cool again. He’s using loot boxes and anime waifus to do it.
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